I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien, to the House and thank him for being here for this important debate.
Poverty and Social Exclusion: Motion
I move:
That Seanad Éireann:notes with concern that:
- in 2021:
- 11.6% of the population of Ireland, or 581,334 people, were living in poverty, of which 163,936 were children;- 4% of the population of Ireland, or 200,460 people, were living in consistent poverty;- approximately 16% of those living in poverty, or 93,013 people, were in employment;- approximately 19% of the population of Ireland, or 952,185 people, were at risk of poverty when housing costs were factored in, and that renters were the worst affected, with 41.6% at risk of poverty after rent was paid;- approximately 45% of one parent families, the majority of which are headed by women, were experiencing enforced deprivation, meaning that they could not afford goods and services considered to be the norm for other households;- 13.8% of the population of Ireland, or 691,587 people, were experiencing deprivation, of which 204,710 were children;- as of 2020, approximately 31% of Irish Traveller households were deemed to be in acute poverty by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency;- persons with a disability face a high risk of poverty due to additional costs not met by existing supports, which according to the 2021 Cost of Disability in Ireland Report, can range from €8,700 to €12,300 per annum;
further notes that:
- the State has failed to achieve its target of reducing consistent poverty to 2% or less by 2020, and that previous targets in this regard have not been met on a consistent basis;- the State’s Combat Poverty Agency, which was operational from 1986-2009, played a significant role in raising awareness of and identifying solutions to poverty;- the shuttering of the Combat Poverty Agency in 2009 as an austerity measure was a profoundly regressive decision, which withdrew resources and focus from anti-poverty strategies and measures at a time when they were most needed;
- due to the subsumption of the work of the Combat Poverty Agency within the Department of Social Protection, the important independent scrutiny of Government policy overseen by the Agency was lost;- in the absence of the Combat Poverty Agency, or another equivalent independent statutory body, Government policy has often not been adequately poverty proofed;- the diversion of resources from long-term anti-poverty research and programmes, like the Combat Poverty Agency, was a false economy, with the increased costs incurred by the State due to the impact of poverty far outweighing the savings made in defunding anti-poverty programmes;- cuts to funding for the public, community and voluntary sectors have not been fully restored in the years since austerity measures were imposed;
recognises that:
- to be in poverty is, in and of itself, very costly;- poverty imposes significant psychological, emotional and social costs on individuals, families and communities;- to make ends meet can necessitate significant sacrifice for individuals and families, which limits options in the short term, and opportunity in the medium to long term;- poverty can give rise to other social problems including, homelessness, addiction, criminality, mental health difficulties and adverse childhood experiences;- the deep-rooted harm caused by intergenerational poverty, and the manifold difficulties which are faced by those trying to escape intergenerational poverty;- the eradication of poverty stands to play an important role in the promotion of equality in Irish life, in both opportunity and outcome;- it is incumbent on the State to alleviate and eradicate poverty;- intervention by the State to alleviate poverty should allow individuals and families to thrive and to live happy, healthy and fulfilling lives;
further recognises that:
- the austerity measures which exacerbated poverty and inequality should be re-evaluated in the light of the new international economic consensus, and such austerity measures should never again be imposed upon the people of Ireland;- the causes of poverty in Ireland are rooted in deep inequalities that pre-date the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the cost-of-living crisis, although they are further exacerbated by these crises;- proposed increases in social protection payments and the national minimum wage will not be sufficient to address the loss in disposable income caused by the cost-of-living crisis;
- as well as short term actions to meet immediate need, long-term, planned and sustained investment in people and public services will be required to address thedeep-rooted structural causes of poverty and deprivation, especially intergenerationally;- poverty requires a whole-of-Government response and its eradication relies on cross-sectoral and cross-departmental mobilisation and communication;
calls on the Government to:
- re-establish an independent Combat Poverty Agency, or a similar independent statutory body, which is empowered and resourced to develop long-term anti-poverty strategies, carry out important research, and lead the Government’s anti-poverty response.- grant appropriate powers and funding to the new Combat Poverty Agency or equivalent to carry out, inter alia, the following functions:
- advising on poverty proofing of all future budgets, and producing pre- and post-budget poverty impact assessments;- reviewing, on an ongoing basis, public policies in areas such as welfare, and making recommendations to Government on potential areas for policy reform;- monitoring and producing annual reports on the Government’s progress towards its Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 goals;- supporting development of the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2025-2030, with the goal of eradicating consistent poverty in the State by 2030;- supporting development of long-term anti-poverty strategies for selected Departments, including the Department of Housing Local Government and Heritage, Department of Social Protection, and the Department of Justice, based on ongoing research on the causes of poverty as they relate to the remit of each Department;- developing specific and targeted anti-poverty strategies in relation to groups with particularly high levels of consistent poverty or deprivation, including, inter alia, Travellers, migrants, persons with a disability, and one-parent families;
and further calls on the Government to:
- support and resource ongoing independent research based on the Minimum Essential Standards of Living (MESL) and apply the learnings from this research in an ongoing analysis of policies relating to welfare payments and the development of a living wage;- carry out research on the potential introduction of a Universal Basic Income for certain groups, in particular care leavers; - re-establish the Education Equality Committee and review the DEIS system to ensure an end to education inequality as a key factor in poverty;- publish the Second Progress Report on the Roadmap for Social Inclusion 2020-2025 without delay.
I welcome the Minister of State to the Chamber. There is a huge amount of detail in the motion and it has a lot of asks. Today I want to ask people to begin to challenge themselves on what they think about what poverty is, how it continues to prevail in people's lives, how invasive it is and the structures that create poverty in the first place.
I come from a very working-class family. My father grew up in the tenements and my mother grew up in Finglas. They did not have much. My father told me stories about having to use beer mats in the soles of his shoes to stop the rain getting in and collecting jam jars to get into the cinema because while they did not have money, they could exchange jam jars to get a ticket. My Grandad Losty in Finglas and other family told me stories about what they brought home from dumps. If there was ever an era for the Green Party it was definitely then, given how much use people made of what they had in very hard and strained circumstances. They made cots for children out of the drawers from a chest of drawers. They made the best use of what they had.
As I began to grow up, I began to observe a different type of poverty. It was not a poverty where I had holes in my shoes. I had shoes on my feet but I had a hole in my heart in terms of my potential, opportunity, who I was going to be in life and who my community would be. I remember realising for the first time how poor so many people are in communities like mine. I was not one of them. My parents worked. Despite the fact they earned low or minimum wages, we never went to school hungry but I watched as my community did. I watched the struggle and the sharing of clothes. My parents secretly gave families on the road clothes that did not fit me any more and tried to keep people afloat.
As I became older and my brain began to take in my environment, I started asking questions about whether poverty is a personal, collective or societal thing. It is very much about power and class. One thing those who experience poverty do not have is power. They do not have the power to be able to create the resources to fix the societal damage that has happened for decades upon decades.
I would like the Minister of State to think about a quote from James Baldwin, who said, "Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor". Poverty costs. It is not only costs in terms of being able to live and survive but it costs the potential of life. Each and every single person has one chance at life. Imagine if that one chance of life was impeded by struggle, pain and having to persevere through life.
I would like to reflect on a comment from the Dáil Chamber this week during a debate when reference was made to O'Connell Street and druggies. How, in 2022, do we have somebody who is the Chair of the Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science talking about druggies and framing people in this way? We know drug use and addiction prevails in the way it does because of poverty. If we are going to shame anybody, it should never be the individual. Rather, we should always focus on the conditions of capitalist markets and the protection of profits over people that have led to poverty continuing in the way that it does. The term "druggies" is dehumanising and separates the person from who we are as community because they are me, we are them and they are Dublin and Ireland. They cannot be separated from us. A person who uses drugs is often trying to escape the reality of poverty. If we chase the thread back from that type of drug use, it goes back to the halls of power, Parliament and legislation over years that has not radically addressed poverty.
In 2008, at the beginning of austerity, we closed down the Combat Poverty Agency, an independent agency that was responsible for tackling policy and examining budgets, research, causes and solutions. During one of the biggest austerities that any of our generation has ever experienced, the Government closed it down. We do not have an independent agency to try to address poverty. We cannot make cosmetic changes in respect of poverty any more, such as a little bit of welfare here or some charity there. We need to radically address poverty.
In order to radically address poverty, we must radically address privilege because they are relational. It is not about trickle-down economics. Rather, it is about looking at wealth and power and how we dismantle that so that there is equal distribution, instead of putting a load of poor people in a room and asking them how they can solve their own poverty without the resources to do so. That is what we do when we when we continue to look to services and charities and put middle-class ideas on working-class people regarding how they will pull themselves up out of poverty.
The idea is that there is an opportunity in society is false. There is no opportunity in society if the conditions in which we live are so unequal that the opportunity is impossible to see and take. It is never about one person succeeding. We will have only begun to address poverty if everybody succeeds and we lift all communities out of poverty. There is no point in constantly referencing the anomalies of successful people within communities because that is not enough. We need to congratulate people who manage social mobility but we definitely do not need to point to them as some sort of job done
We must genuinely look at ourselves and at what type of society we want. Wealth and power for the few and misery for the many is definitely not a society that I think any of us wish to stand over.
Going back again to the comments made about drug use and crime etc., I do not think anybody who has ever experienced the things I have had to experience in my life can think people choose that way of life. I know people who feel like they are just waiting to die. Some of my friends are just waiting to welcome death. This is what poverty does. It seeps into everything people are, everything they hope for and their whole view on life. People are getting to the end of their lives and it feels welcome. People wear poverty. They look unwell, they feel sad and they are carrying way too much strain.
I read a book called Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass by Darren McGarvey, and I recommend that anybody interested in understanding entrenched poverty read it. The author has lots of great quotes in the book, but one of them is "How do we solve poverty if all your jobs depend on it?". This is what we need to discuss. Whose jobs depend on poverty existing? We do have a poverty industry. We have an industry where poverty is profitable for other people and we must begin to address this. We cannot keep looking at individuals and asking why they are not coming out of poverty without looking at the systems and conditions that have created them in the first place.
It is not easy to live in a society where people, structures and policies are implicated in creating the conditions to allow poverty to exist. It is also not easy, though, to be able to challenge those if someone's life every day is based on the next decision about what happens that day. We think about how to pay a bill, and all these kinds of things, but poverty is so much bigger. It is so much more entrenched. We can change this situation. I have been in this Chamber for six years and people agree with me. They will nod their heads and they will agree, but nobody seems to take any responsibility for the fact that we are responsible for poverty. We make those decisions. People sit around tables and make decisions about how not to address poverty. This is why we need the Combat Poverty Agency.
For me, poverty is in direct opposition to human dignity. If the Government cannot afford people human dignity by ensuring their lives are ones worth living and that they can build futures worth having and if we can accept living in a society where some people do not have that chance while we do, then we really need to reflect on this situation. We must reflect on it and act radically. We must stop making cosmetic changes. We need to stop making small little welfare budget increases here and there, because this is cross-departmental. To do this, we must address what is inside ourselves. We are protecting the poverty industry. We are protecting policies that force people to die.
We always talk about the death count and the body count in circumstances such as pandemics, hurricanes, weather warnings and similar things that happen around the world. If we truly cared and understood the loss of life because of poverty, and poverty falls under the umbrella of Government policy and a lack of will and ambition to radically address poverty here, I would ask the question as to whether poverty benefits us and if we are willing to challenge this in ourselves. Have our careers, and those of many others, now come to rely on poverty? We must be able to stand up to this situation and radically address poverty in this country, because we are responsible.
I second this motion. I am glad to be here to be able to second this powerful motion tabled by my friend and colleague, Senator Ruane. Poverty is a scourge. It afflicts the lives of a shameful number of people. Living in poverty makes everything so much harder. Deprivation robs people of the peace and security they need to relax, to enjoy themselves and to plan for the future. Every day is a challenge to acquire what is needed to live. It is an endurance test to see how long people can cope.
The Preamble to our Constitution refers to assuring "the dignity and freedom of the individual". Poverty robs people of their dignity and freedom. Poverty is expensive and unhealthy. Poverty creates desperation and hopelessness and, like my colleague said, fuels addiction and criminal offending. Our prisons contain many people trapped in a cycle of addiction, offending and incarceration. The common denominators are poverty, social exclusion and our collective failure to act. It is impossible for people to be free when they are trapped in debt and cannot provide for themselves and the people they care about. It is impossible for people to be free when they are in and out of prison because they are forced to sustain themselves through petty crime.
There is something perverse about the way we brag about our inflated GDP when 11.6% of people live in poverty. There is something bizarre about our claims to be modern and developed when 4% of the population live in consistent poverty. What good is €6 billion in a rainy day fund when children are living in hotel rooms for months on end and older people are being forced to make a choice between heating and eating? The Government's policies are exacerbating poverty. The Government has refused to meet the demands of the housing crisis and to build adequate quantities of social and affordable housing. Instead, it has decided to use the housing assistance payment, HAP, to prop up a deeply dysfunctional private rental market. This is a massive cost to the Exchequer. It provides people with a degree of protection from homelessness but it does not create new State assets. HAP-supported tenants experience great difficulty in finding places to live and remain vulnerable to eviction. If they lose their tenancy, they must start from scratch in a rental market that is deeply inhospitable, especially for people on low incomes.
Social housing is a highly effective way of reducing and preventing poverty. It provides security and certainty, which in turn provides a more conducive environment for employment, education and recovery from mental health and addiction issues. Differential rents insulate people on low incomes from poverty. According to a recent report from Social Justice Ireland, 59% of people receiving rent subsidies, like HAP, and the rental accommodation scheme, RAS, live below the poverty line once their housing costs are paid. Poverty is built into the system. What is worse is that these subsidised tenancies contribute to the upward pressure on rents, making the whole market more unaffordable for everyone.
The housing crisis is the biggest economic and moral crisis in the State. The answer is ambitious, State-led development of social and affordable housing. This is an emergency and we need to act swiftly and decisively. Ireland's failure to meet its poverty reduction targets should be a source of great shame to all of us. It makes a mockery of our inflated GDP and bumper corporate tax intake. Why does a country flush with wealth fail such a large part of its population so thoroughly? We need to treat this issue with the urgency it warrants.
Almost all the issues we discuss in this Chamber intersect with poverty. Organisations such as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, Focus Ireland, Social Justice Ireland and many others provide us with vital insights into these issues. However, much more is needed. We desperately need an independent organisation that can provide oversight, conduct research and provide expertise that can be used to poverty-proof Government policy. I hope the Minister of State will support this important and timely motion. Combating poverty will save the State money. It will create a more peaceful and prosperous society and prevent a great deal of unnecessary suffering. It is a moral imperative and we must act.
I thank the Civil Engagement Group for bringing forward this motion. One of the main reasons so many of us in this House got into politics was to tackle and challenge intergenerational poverty. It is one of the reasons I got into politics. I come from a privileged background. Growing up and helping my dad, I was able to see the difference between what my friends and I had and what other people had. One of my most vivid memories comes from the 2009 local elections. Senator Moynihan was around then as well and we used to do a lot of canvassing. I remember so many houses in the inner city had blue walls, caused not by paint but by blue mould.
I remember writing hundreds of letters to the council. I did not get elected at the time. At the end of the day, it did not reply to me; it just sent all the letters relating to the blue mould back to me. However, a few years later, a colleague at the Bar said they were bringing a case to the European Court of Human Rights and were able to get my letter on discovery from the council. At least something good came from it.
Senator Black hit the nail on the head. Housing is a huge issue when it comes to challenging intergenerational poverty as is education. I was not aware the Combat Poverty Agency closed. I hope the Minister of State takes that on board today. The foundations for that agency are there and it could be revived in some way without reinventing the wheel.
We have a good housing plan. The Minister, Deputy Darragh O’Brien, will invest €20 billion per year into our housing stock. In the past year, I have been at many more housing launches compared to any other year. The number of commencement notices before the council has increased dramatically. We are seeing an increase in supply. It will be slow, but there is a political will there. I hope that we will see that change and people getting housing, whether through cost-rental models, the social housing list or affordable housing. There are schemes and it is coming on track, so we cannot dismiss that completely.
On education, I have said consistently that we need to revisit the Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools, DEIS, model. It is just not impacting schools in our cities and towns where one sees the real impact of intergenerational deprivation. We have to revisit it. The original DEIS model worked. We saw attainment ratios go well up, where kids would go on to do their leaving certificate, which was not even dreamed of before, and go on to third level. We need to strive much higher. We need to ensure that we look again at the model, put much more investment into the DEIS model and call it something else. It has to be revisited. The DEIS model is not is a model of sweets to be given to every school in the country. It has to be targeted in areas that need it most.
We had a good budget. There are huge welfare packages coming down the road. Obviously, they are short term, but I think they will be welcomed by people in the short term. We will see a €12 increase in the basic core social welfare payments, the once-off double payment, the Christmas bonus and the list goes on. However, it is not enough. I think all of us in this House are on the same page. I do not think any of us are profiting from it or are looking to profit or keep people down.
However, we are clearly not doing enough. There are people living in extreme poverty. There are children who are not going to school because their parents are not able to send them. We have huge addiction problems in this city and in our towns. It calls for a redirection of funds. Senator Ruane called for a citizens’ assembly on drugs use. That is part of it. We need to figure it out exactly.
We are seeing a huge increase in crime around the city. Much of it is among teenagers who are bored because they have not had any investment into their lives. They cut off the funding to all the youth diversion programmes during the recession. Kids just want to be entertained and in other countries they seem to be much better at giving the kids the skills to use their time more wisely. However, in Ireland, we seem to have just forgotten a core group of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 17. We have just sort of let them loose on the streets without thinking about what they are up to and giving them the proper supports.
I see kids outside my office. Sometimes they are in big gangs and one does not get to know them because they are in gangs together. However, if one can manage to talk to them one-on-one, they are lovely kids. They just need someone to listen to them sometimes. In a big gang, they can be quite intimidating, and there is no point saying they are not quite intimidating. However, I do not think it is their fault, rather, it is our fault for not putting the supports in place to help and engage with them. At the end of the day, those we are reading about in newspapers are all kids. It is our fault for not looking after them properly, not giving them proper education, not giving their parents proper housing and not looking after their parents when they needed help for whatever addiction issues they had. If you ring the HSE addiction line looking for help for someone who is an alcoholic, for instance, you may be waiting. There is no point in even having that HSE line. People ring up and leave messages, but no one is getting back to anybody. We have all tried to help constituents and friends and family, but there is very little help out there for people. I commend the motion and I will be supporting it.
The Minister of State will speak after we have heard from one Senator from each political grouping. That is when he will come in. He has agreed to wait until that. We will have one key speech per group and then move to the Minister of State. We will get everyone else in later.
I thank the Civil Engagement Group for tabling this important motion. The Government is taking it very seriously as well because there is no amendment to it. Everybody agrees that we have to do everything we can to take everybody out of poverty. Anybody who is in poverty should be taken out of it if at all possible. When one listens to the speakers on poverty, what can cause it and what brings people into it, one can see this country has made great strides.
Over the past 20 years or so, there has never been better sports facilities. There has never been more money put into sports facilities throughout the length and breadth of the country, whether in cities or rural areas. There is more for young people to do than ever before. One wonders in many cases why there is so much poverty. There have never been more people at work in the country. We have the best social welfare system in the world - there is no doubt about that. If one goes to any European country, America or any place one wants, there is no country that has a better social welfare system than we have and yet we have many people who are on the bread line and many people who are living in poverty.
This budget was probably the greatest budget ever delivered in the history of this State. There are very few people who did not get something out of this budget. The Government was very wise in some of the decisions that it made on increasing social welfare payments, as well as paying one-off payments, so that there is not a recurring cost to the Exchequer and provision does not have to be made in the long term.
When one goes through all of those issues, one would wonder where we go. As rightly said by the previous speakers, housing and education are a huge drain on the taxpayer. It is very difficult for young people, in particular, to get their foot on the housing ladder. Housing has never been as expensive or as scarce than it is at this time. We have had some perfect crashes in the past ten or 12 years, with the banks failing and everybody demonising builders and developers, which has led to a scarcity of houses. When one considers that we were building 90,000 houses a year and now we are building 20,000 houses plus, that is an enormous difference. We have never had such a large population. We have the largest population since the Famine. When one joins all of those things together, one can easily see why there is so much pressure on the housing sector. The Government has to find ways of building houses more quickly and getting more houses onto the market, whether that is through subsidies, the planning laws or a combination of a number of things. It has to be done.
The State and taxpayers are paying a huge price in relation to trying to get people accommodated. There is no house now that does not have a contribution made to it by the taxpayer. The taxpayer is paying enormous amounts of money through various schemes to help people and it has a knock-on effect.
That has increased the price of houses. As I have said in this House on a number of occasions, we have to look at taxation in regard to housing.
Many measures were introduced in the budget and all of those are helping people to come out of poverty and helping them in many other ways. They are all welcome. We have never had more people at work, some 2.51 million, which is the highest ever. I welcome the motion from the Civil Engagement Group. We have to find ways to look at energy and at intergenerational poverty, and whether that is through setting up a new agency to replace the existing one, it is a matter the Government should look at seriously. We all want to see people come out of poverty. The Government has done a considerable amount in the last budget and I thank the Minister of State in that regard.
I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O’Brien, to the House. I thank the Civil Engagement Group for tabling the motion. Clearly, all is not well and that is why the motion is before us - that is the reality. Despite what people might like to think, or might like to peddle, there are real issues about poverty and exclusion. Like any motion, there is no point coming into this House and just talking words, and none of us disagreeing or challenging the core issues of such an important motion. This motion from the Civil Engagement Group is a rallying call to action. There is no point in us reiterating what people already know.
At the outset, I want to thank Senators Ruane, Higgins, Black and Flynn and the Civil Engagement Group for preparing what is a very important and timely motion. I would like to think that, from here on, if we agree with it, we would agree with the commitments in it. There are many asks in this motion and, therefore, to be successful, we want commitments from the Minister of State that he and his Department are going to deliver on the asks. In the limited time that I have, I want to focus on the issue of energy policy. I note that one of the key asks in the motion is the re-establishment of an independent combat poverty agency or a similar independent statutory body, empowered and resourced to develop long-term anti-poverty strategies, carry out important research and lead the Government's anti-poverty response. I fully support those asks, as I do with all other asks in this important motion.
As a said, I want to use my limited time to focus on energy policy. Recommendations for a new energy poverty strategy were submitted to the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications by a group of important organisations, which include Age Action, Clondalkin Travellers Development Group, Community Law & Mediation, FLAC, Friends of the Earth Ireland, Independent Living Movement Ireland, the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, the Irish Heart Foundation, Irish Rural Link, the Irish Traveller Movement, the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, MABS, the Northside Partnership, Not Here Not Anywhere, Pavee Point and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, to name but a few. Clearly, the absence of a coherent strategy has left a number of groups seriously concerned. Their concerns are about the local income of householders and vulnerable groups, particularly those exposed to the energy crisis and its cost. This group of people who made contact with the Minister of State highlighted recommendations on seven key principles to underpin what they describe as a new energy poverty strategy that would - this is important for the Minister of State - align with justice and climate action, and would also address inequalities and ensure the cost does not fall unfairly on the marginalised and vulnerable groups that we are talking about tonight.
We need to commit to deliver an energy poverty Act and I ask the Minister of State whether the Government is prepared to do that. Is the Government going to produce an energy poverty Act to ensure accountability and a long-term political commitment towards the eradication of energy poverty? It is a very important issue. While I do not necessarily like the cliché “heat or eat”, the reality is that it is the same groups that are suffering in terms of costs, providing for their families and providing food, and energy is important.
The Combat Poverty Agency did an amazing amount of work. Clearly, this motion asks for its re-establishment. I would strongly commend the call for the establishment of a combat poverty agency or a similar independent statutory body but, importantly, one that is empowered with the adequate resources to develop and monitor the independent poverty strategy. What is important is its independence, its remove from Government, its remove from any Ministry, and for it to be able to independently give a critical analysis of the Government's action in regard to these matters.
I commend the Civil Engagement Group Senators on bringing this important motion before the House. I do not know what sort of response the Minister of State is going to give to the House but I ask that a full commitment would be given to the asks in this motion, if it is to be meaningful. I thank the Civil Engagement Group for their work in this regard.
I welcome the Minister of State. Tá áthas orm go bhfuil an deis a labhairt sa díospóireacht seo. I commend the Civil Engagement Group on bringing forward this issue and for their very strong words in favour of this motion in the moving of it.
We know the annual survey on income and living standards is the official source of data on households and individual incomes and it provides a number of key national poverty indicators. In May, its most recent report showed that the at-risk of poverty rate was 11.6% in 2021, which is a reduction, but it is notable that without the Covid-19 income supports, the at-risk of poverty rate would have been 19.9%. While any reduction in risk of poverty and enforced deprivation rates is welcome, what we need to see if we are serious about tackling this is a consistent reduction in the rates year on year. Figures and poverty indicators tell us that we need effective measures which support all types of families and workers across our society.
I would like to address a number of areas of concern for Sinn Féin in regard to particular groups that are impacted by poverty, no more so than lone-parent households, who we know continue to experience much higher rates of poverty than households with two adults or more. In 2021, the at-risk of poverty rate for persons living in a one-adult household with children was 22.8%, double the national average, and the deprivation rate in lone-parent families also increased between 2020 and 2021 and now stands at 44.9%. We know the Government has committed to implementing anti-poverty measures for lone parents, yet we still see nothing from it regarding overdue reforms of the child maintenance system, despite the fact the research shows that, when paid, maintenance can play a role in lifting children out of poverty. Our Sinn Féin colleagues in the Dáil have repeatedly called for the Minister, Deputy Humphreys, to publish the long-awaited report from the child maintenance review group.
Another group that is particularly vulnerable to poverty is people with disabilities or long-term illnesses, who face much higher levels of poverty than others. The European Disability Forum's human rights report 2021 found that 38.1% of people with disabilities in Ireland are at risk of poverty and social exclusion. That is the fifth worst in the EU. Again, while the Government has yet to announce any plans regarding the cost of disability, there is a clear need to provide supports which recognise the additional cost for somebody who is living with a long-term illness or a disability.
To move on to the cost-of-living crisis, which has become acute in recent months, 42% of households now say they had difficulty in making ends meet in 2021. Anybody who was listening to RTÉ radio today and who heard the woman who runs the Cork Penny Dinners centre could not help but be both horrified and moved by the compassion of that organisation and the service it is providing.
The 200 people showing up were people who had either addiction issues or a particular set of problems that led them to needing the support of the Penny Dinners. Now they are seeing up to 900 people and many of them are the working poor. I find it bizarre to hear Senator Burke outlining this utopia he seems to be living in when all around us we can see the deprivation and poverty is getting worse. I recommend the Senator listens to the episode this morning from the Cork Penny Dinners.
The issue around energy poverty is one that is very close to my heart. Since I have entered this House, I have raised how the Government's energy poverty strategy lapsed in 2019 and continued to remain a non-priority. I conducted a survey in November 2019 to which we had hundreds of responses and it showed even then how acute and widespread energy poverty was before the Ukraine war induced inflation. Despite all the evidence, the Government is still not prioritising energy poverty. Sinn Féin introduced legislation which would oblige the Government to develop a strategy. Instead what the Government has done is a public consultation on the energy poverty strategy which closed in September. We need this issue to be prioritised and we need action. All of the NGOs know what the problems are around energy poverty and how we can fix them, so we do not need to be carrying out time wasting public consultations. We need action on it now.
The collection of data is of particular concern to us in that we are not collecting data on a whole range of issues. We are extremely poor as a State at collecting data. If one does not have the data and the figures it is hard to address the problems when one does not know the level or the scale of the issue. The State does not measure child, fuel or food poverty. It does not measure employment, unemployment, poverty or deprivation on a county level. It is not collecting data around the retrofitting programme in terms of household income. Therefore, we do not know how much of a wealth transfer the current retrofit programme is because we are not collecting the household income data, other than for the small cohort who are eligible for the warmer homes scheme. Interestingly, we also do not collect data on wealth. The Department of Finance repeatedly refuses to calculate the cost of implementing a wealth tax. Only recently a Government colleague was in the House telling us we cannot impose a luxury emissions tax on private jets because we do not collect the data on the number of private jets that land here; we only have estimations. We all know that if wealth is not measured, it makes it much harder to tax it.
I commend the motion and I thank the Civil Engagement Group for bringing it forward. I apologise that I have leave to go to another meeting.
I apologise for being late and not hearing my Civil Engagement colleagues give their opening speeches on this topic. I have come from a housing committee meeting where we are waiving pre-legislative scrutiny for the introduction of an eviction ban this year over the winter period. One of the issues we were all concerned about and were raising, was the tenant in situ scheme and how to ensure the effective application of this scheme over the winter. That is going to be the focus of some of my contribution to this debate and I will focus on three main areas.
I welcome the Minister of State to the House. It is rare enough that a Minister has such a command of his brief and also knowledge of and passion for it. I know he comes from a community sector background so having somebody like him in charge of this area of social inclusion is very welcome but I also realise the limitations he has in terms of being able to co-ordinate the other big spending Departments.
I will start by focusing on housing because the theme of this motion is consistent poverty. Without the security of a house and home, it is very difficult to do things like do well in school. It is very difficult to get a stable and secure job. It is one of those things that contributes to addiction issues. Over the past 20 to 30 years, we have effectively privatised our social housing system. Over the past number of weeks, we have seen people decrying small landlords - or landlords people are saying are small - leaving the sector and the vulnerability that this opens up in terms in the increase in our homeless numbers. The reality is that we should not have as big a private rented sector as we do. We have 62,000 people requiring social housing supports who, because of income inadequacy, will probably never be able to afford their own home, yet they are at the mercy of the private rental sector. They are at the mercy of a casual private rental sector where one can evict people on the basis of sale or to move in family members. Those 62,000 people should not have to go up against that insecurity day after day, month after month, year after year. Those 62,000 households and families should be housed in a secure private rental sector. It costs us €900 million each year between the housing assistance payment, HAP, and rental accommodation scheme, RAS, and other supports and we spend on average €1,900 per tenancy, per month. That is about €20,000 per year.
We know from the Dublin Region Homeless Executive, for example, that approximately 70% of families entering homelessness are coming from the HAP system and sector. One of the things we need to do with this eviction ban is use the time and place to scale up the tenant in situ scheme. I have addressed this on many occasions. Where a HAP or RAS tenant is under an eviction notice, entering homelessness or finding other accommodation, the local authority would buy that housing and take it back into social housing control and stock. Some local authorities simply do not want to manage it and are quite happy with the private sector fulfilling that need but that leads to a huge insecurity in tenancies. People move around from house to house and home to home and any children involved are never able to fulfil their full potential because the threat of homelessness is always there in the background. It is always hanging over them. I have heard from the other side of the House that we need to balance the rights of landlords and tenants. I do not agree because for one it is an investment and for the other it is a home and there is no balancing of that.
The second issue I want to address is education. I will focus in particular on the impact of Covid-19 on education and the shutdowns. I am going to sound like an anti-vaxxer and an anti-lockdown person. I am not but we have failed the most disadvantaged children we have in terms of the number of shutdowns and lockdowns we had. I was a teacher before I came to the House and had many disadvantaged students. The one thing I noticed over the time period between me being elected and finishing my last school year, was how many students I had who were reliant on data and who did not have access to broadband or a laptop. My niece is a teacher and a home school liaison officer in a very disadvantaged school and she spoke of the number of children she had who were learning from home on mobile phones and using data because there was no broadband. Access to food, energy and technology was key. Other countries such as the Netherlands recognised the impact those lockdowns had in terms of the disruption to children's education and put in place funding to be able to address that yet we did not do it to the same extent. We have moved on very quickly without adequately addressing those big gaps and blocks in those children's lives and education. The Labour Party and my party leader, Deputy Bacik, have called for a catch-up fund for children and we really need to have a look into that. It follows up on Senator Ardagh's point about DEIS schools and targeting supports. We really need to look at and accelerate more targeted supports for people in DEIS schools who suffered from continuous lockdowns and need to catch up in terms of education.
The Minister of State will speak and others can come back in after.
I sincerely thank Senators Ruane, Higgins, Black and Flynn for creating the opportunity to discuss the reality of poverty. One of the challenges in tackling poverty is that it is simply not spoken about often enough in public and political discourse. I get relatively few parliamentary questions on it though it is one of the Government's most important areas of action. I am genuinely interested in hearing different perspectives and constructive suggestions on how we might tackle poverty and hope there is a way we can continue this conversation after this debate as the format that constrains us may limit our scope to have some over and back discussion.
As Minister of State with responsibility for the roadmap for social inclusion in the Department of Social Protection, I have a particular interest in the issue at hand but it also very much crosses into my community development responsibilities in the Department of Rural and Community Development.
With regard to the motion before us today, I will respond by setting out the work that is ongoing to address the issues the Senators have raised. Debates about poverty can get weighed down by statistics but it is important to look at some objective measures. The key measure that I look at since I started this job is the consistent poverty rate. The target for 2025 is 2% or less. That target has never been reached before and it was set pre-Covid, pre-Ukraine crisis and pre-cost-of-living crisis. Nevertheless it is crucial we stay focused on that 2% target.
The latest Central Statistics Office, CSO, survey on income and living conditions, SILC, data for 2021 show a reduction in the consistent poverty rate in Ireland from 4.7% in 2020 to 4% in 2021. This latest reduction continues a trend that has seen the consistent poverty rate fall in each of the last six years. Ireland’s system of social transfers consistently performs as one of the most effective in the EU in reducing both poverty and income inequality.
After social transfers, Ireland’s at-risk-of-poverty rate and its Gini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality, are both below the EU average and are continuing their downward trend. The 2021 in-work-at-risk-of-poverty rate in Ireland is also less than half the EU average. That is not to say for one moment that the situation is anything but unacceptable. While the overall consistent poverty rate is the key indicator, it can mask the reality faced by those groups that face much higher than average rates of consistent poverty. The Senators' motion speaks to this point when they reference the much higher rates faced by people with disabilities, one-parent families, children and Travellers.
We have carried out research in recent years to guide us on the most effective social welfare payments to address poverty rates. Underscoring all of this is the fact that we have - as the motion calls us to do - continued to support and resource ongoing independent research based on the minimum essential standard of living, MESL. This is the target we need to hit and we directly support the Vincentian MESL Research Centre.
Last year I asked the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, to examine what payments and what levels of investment in particular payments are most effective is helping us to reduce the consistent poverty rate. I would draw Senators' attention to it as it really lays out some practical steps that the Government can take to hit our poverty targets.
The working family payment was one of the payments identified as being most effective at reducing poverty and it was that research finding that assisted me in pushing for a €40 increase in its thresholds and the working-family-payment lump sum in the recent budget. All three budgets of this Government have been heavily informed by research. That is why increases in qualified child payments, one-parent family income disregards and living alone and fuel allowances were prioritised in the budgets of 2020 to 2022. I would certainly have wished to see higher increases in various payment rates. However, the most recent budget was about trying to find a balance between many legitimate demands. Despite these challenges, we managed to secure the biggest social welfare budget in the history of the State.
I welcome the post-budget analysis by the ESRI that shows that budget 2023 measures, including the one-off cost of living measures introduced as part of the budget, will substantially cushion real incomes against the rise in the cost of living and that people on low incomes will be slightly better off compared to a budget adjusted purely for inflation.
The motion makes particular reference to poverty levels among single-parent households. As a result of budget 2023, families with children, including single parents, can benefit from a range of measures which I will not list because I will not get it all in timewise. The budget 2023 expenditure report published on budget day notes that a lone-parent household stands to receive a €1,872 increase in support as a consequence of the measures brought in.
The motion further calls on the Government to re-establish the Combat Poverty Agency, which was moved to the Department of Social Protection and asserts that in its absence, Government policies have not been adequately poverty proofed. I commend the work carried out by the Combat Poverty Agency and its staff during its existence. The agency provided a very valuable service.
At the time of its establishment, relatively little was known about incomes, poverty and deprivation in Ireland. The agency was forefront in developing our knowledge of the drivers of poverty, understanding who experiences poverty and deprivation and reporting on progress. I recall getting the regular combat poverty magazines.
However, it is not wholly correct to say that the functions of the Combat Poverty Agency were discontinued as much of the work continues under a new social inclusion division that was created within the Department of Social Protection for which I hold ministerial responsibility. The incorporation of the unit within the Department not only means that it has direct line of sight to a responsible Minister but it also enables anti-poverty initiatives to be mainstreamed across the Government.
It has also led directly to poverty impact assessments being formally incorporated into the work of the Departments of Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform and Social Protection. The incorporation of the unit within the Department also means that detailed poverty impact and distributional assessments are completed and published prior to and following budget day, which would not have been possible if the unit was a separate agency. This has increased our capacity to make informed evidence-based policy.
The roadmap for social inclusion has the ambitious target to reduce the percentage of the population in consistent poverty to 2% or less by 2025. The roadmap translates this ambition into 66 unique commitments that are assigned across relevant Departments and its implementation is overseen by a steering group, which I chair. The inclusion of senior officials means that poverty and social inclusion initiatives remain on the agenda of the management boards across Departments, while the community and voluntary sector representatives on the board provide an invaluable external perspective on progress and priorities.
The steering group oversees the annual progress reports on the implementation of roadmap commitments. The motion before us today calls for the publication of the second progress report and I am pleased to be able to announce that the progress report and accompanying report card have, following consideration by Government earlier this week, been published this afternoon.
The motion calls for the development of a successor to the roadmap for the period 2025 to 2030. I can assure Senators that a new strategy will be developed to succeed the current roadmap. An independent mid-term review of the roadmap is under way.
With regard to the call in today’s motion to develop specific strategies, on foot of a specific commitment under the roadmap, I established and chair a food poverty working group comprising officials from relevant Departments and representatives of the community and voluntary sector. This group published a mapping exercise in July on work across the Government to address food poverty and has commissioned independent research on the drivers of food poverty, which I hope to publish in quarter 1 next year.
I also secured funding under budget 2023 to launch a new programme that will engage directly with people experiencing food poverty and identify and address the individual and related policy issues. These activities are all being administered by the social inclusion division in the Department of Social Protection, which has amalgamated the functions of the Combat Poverty Agency.
In addition to the roadmap steering group and food poverty working group, my Department continues to engage with a broad range of stakeholders on matters related to poverty and social inclusion across a wide range of forums. The annual social inclusion forum is one such event that I was pleased to host in June this year, which brings together policy makers, service providers and service users from across Departments, NGOs, community and voluntary sector groups and representatives of people experiencing poverty to discuss and debate national policy on poverty reduction and social inclusion. Independent research and analysis on poverty continues to be commissioned and funded by the Department of Social Protection through our research partnership with the ESRI and various procurement contracts.
There is a particular phrase from the Senators' motion that I wish to draw upon and which states "as well as short term actions to meet immediate need, long-term, planned and sustained investment in people and public services will be required to address the deep-rooted structural causes of poverty and deprivation, especially intergenerationally". There is a lot in that sentence. I agree with it and in many ways we could have today's debate on that sentence alone. However I will unpack it a little in terms of some current relevant Government actions. The roadmap is predicated on two basic pillars, which are improved incomes and improved public services.
First, I have spoken a bit about improved incomes via social welfare but, of course, employment is a key way improving incomes as well. We have a situation at the moment of low unemployment where jobs are available and there are plenty of vacancies but significant groups of people are not accessing these jobs. It really lays bare the reality of the barriers that some groups of people face in trying to get a job in Ireland. People with disabilities and Travellers are two such groups that come to mind. I do not have the time to go into some of the work that I am doing at the moment to try to bridge the gap between Travellers and the labour market. I am looking at whatever levers I have available to me help address the structural barriers facing Travellers seeking employment, which has led to an unacceptably high unemployment rate for Travellers.
Second, there are quite a few commitments in the roadmap related to improving access to public services but the current cost of living crisis has shown us the potential for going further in making public services more accessible and less monetised.
Budget 2023 includes a number of important measures, such as the abolition of all inpatient hospital charges, a 25% reduction in childcare costs, free contraception, free school books and reduced public transport fares. Many of these are not in the roadmap but they speak to the principle of better and more accessible public services. There is scope for similar measures to be included in the next roadmap.
The motion refers to the need to address "the deep-rooted structural causes of poverty and deprivation, especially intergenerationally". On Monday last, UN Day for the Eradication of Poverty, the Department of Rural and Community Development launched a research report on intergenerational poverty funded by Pobal and the ESRI. The report stresses that policy interventions are needed to address childhood poverty, not just because of the immediate impact on children living in poverty but also because of longer-term negative implications. Education came up in that report and DEIS was also mentioned. Significant increases in DEIS funding and a refining of how it targets schools have happened in the past year. It is very important that DEIS reaches those most in need. Last week I met representatives of a Limerick Travellers group in Southhill. The women I met gave numerous examples of children who had moved from primary to secondary school who still could not read or write. DEIS is a good thing but it needs to have better reach.
In the context of the phrase "deep-rooted structural causes of poverty", I want to mention the issue of discrimination. Whether on grounds of disability, family status, racism or sexual orientation, discrimination can have a sealing effect around people and communities that blocks off or limits routes out of poverty. This is particularly relevant to today’s debate when we speak of discrimination on the grounds of socioeconomic status. In many circumstances, it is not just the material reality of people's situation that is limiting them, it can also be wider society’s perception of them because they come from a particular area. This is particularly damaging for children and young people who can grow up internalising this wider discriminatory view. My colleague, the Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth, Deputy O’Gorman, is in the process of reviewing our equality legislation and exploring the possibility of adding socioeconomic status as an additional ground for discrimination in the Equality Acts.
The final issue I want to touch on is area-concentrated poverty. I refer here to geographical areas, often quite small, that have not been well served in terms of public services or that might have higher than average levels of unemployment, for example. This is an area I am putting increasing focus on in my role in the Department of Rural and Community Development. The Government’s main social inclusion tool at a community level across the country is the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP, under which approximately 600 community workers are employed around the country by local development companies to work with disadvantaged communities at a one-to-one level but also to help build the capacity of community groups. Last year I worked hard to get SICAP its largest budget increase ever of 10% and this is having a real impact on the ground. Later this week I will announce the new funding model for the community services programme, CSP. The new model will give increased funding to those CSP projects that are operating in areas of disadvantage where the capacity to generate their own income is more limited than others.
Last year I launched the new community development programme which saw seven projects begin that were led by Travellers, people with disabilities, Roma and others. I hope to grow this programme next year. Earlier this year I launched the empowering communities programme, which identified 14 of the most disadvantaged small areas across the country. Community workers have started working with these communities to support them to develop their own programme of work and actions on the issues the communities themselves see as priorities. I mention these initiatives in the context of a debate about poverty as it is crucial that we recognise the fact that people experiencing poverty have the answers. They have agency and it is important that we support individuals and communities to develop and implement their own solutions to area-concentrated poverty and its implications. The place-based leadership programme that we are funding in Darndale and Drogheda deserves a special mention in this regard and is another programme that I plan to grow next year.
As Minister of State with responsibility for the implementation of roadmap commitments, I am committed to reducing poverty and bringing about real change during the lifetime of the roadmap. I warmly welcome the focus of this evening’s discussion and I look forward to listening to the remaining contributions from all sides.
I thank Senator Ruane for tabling this motion. It is crucial that we discuss poverty, which does not get as much discussion time as it should.
I represent Roscommon and Galway in the west, counties which have dispersed populations, many of whose members experience rural isolation. Senator Ruane spoke about her background, and I would like to speak about mine. I was the first person in my family to go to college. I grew up on a small farm. Both of my parents farmed and had part-time jobs on top of that, but we were always at the pin of our collar. There are so many families who struggle in that way. Some of the challenges faced by my parent's generation, 40 or 50 years ago, were relieved by the valve of emigration. People left the country to better their prospects. To be here as a representative now is, for me, absolutely astonishing, given that my grandparents struggled hard to raise a family. Indeed, they struggled to even have children who survived, such were the rates of infant mortality. My parents also struggled. It is amazing to see the country Ireland has become today, particularly when one thinks of the poverty in the 1950s and 1960s. I do not want to take away from the poverty we are dealing with right now but when one looks back to that period, one realises how much the country has changed.
As a democratic country, we must continue to strive to achieve even better statistics. The Minister of State visited my town of Ballinasloe earlier this year. He visited Galway Rural Development Company Limited, which leads the SICAP in Galway and which focuses on social inclusion and community activation. I had an opportunity to speak to the Minister of State that day and I highlighted the fact that Ballinasloe is a town with a lot of challenges. It ranks very highly on the Pobal deprivation index, along with many city centre areas in Dublin. We are talking about deep-natured structural poverty that is intergenerational. Breaking that cycle can be a real challenge. The Minister of State and I also discussed the fact that certain supports are needed. He spoke about SICAP which is funded through the LEADER programme by the Department of Rural and Community Development. We need a family resource centre in Ballinasloe because there are segments of our population that are really vulnerable. In particular, I refer to single parents, often single mothers, with young children, Travellers and people with disabilities. We need to have supports such as family resource centres in the areas we have identified.
The Minister of State talked about the empowering communities programme. County Galway is one of the 14 areas included in that and I would be grateful if he would provide details on the specific areas within the county that are included. I also have a question for the Minister of State related to the census. The Pobal deprivation index gets so much of its data from the 2016 census. When are we going to see the outworking of the last census in 2021?
Senator Boylan talked about a lack of statistics. I disagree with her on that. We do have statistics. Our census is a key tool for gathering information about our country and helps to inform us on the measures and policies we need to put in place. The challenge we have in the west, in the context of the provision of services and amenities, comes down to population. We have people who are struggling but we do not have enough of them. If the population is not in the 1 million bracket or the 500,000 bracket, how does one get the services needed? In Ballinasloe, we have a level 1 DEIS primary school and a secondary school. The only secondary school in Galway that was added to the DEIS programme was in Ballinasloe. Across the country, one in four schools is accessing supports under DEIS.
It is said that one must judge a country by the way it treats its most vulnerable and I agree. That is the measure we should always use. We have to fight. Fine Gael believes in fighting for a fair society, where all are equal and where everybody has opportunities. We must focus on disadvantaged areas and their access to supports. I am my party's spokesperson on education. For me, education must be about supporting young children from disadvantaged areas. The free schoolbooks programme at primary level is very important, as is the school summer programme, which was announced yesterday.
It was announced just yesterday. That is €10 million that has been allocated for people, particularly children, from educational disadvantage. We need to see more schools do those two weeks of summer provision. We see, I think, 25% of our schools, primary and secondary, rolling out that programme. That is only in recent years. We need to see more schools doing that to ensure that those children, be it from the point of view of literacy or numeracy, can get added supports and that additional two-week focus. It does not need to involve only the principals and the teachers; student teachers, different therapies, nursing and healthcare could also come in and deliver that programme. We need to see more of the programme rolled out.
Something else I will mention is apprenticeships and the importance of earning and learning. It is perhaps very expensive and maybe it puts young people on the back foot in respect of the leaving certificate and their saying they cannot get a qualification. However, there are also opportunities for young people to get qualifications through a lot of our apprenticeships, which have been broadened out to so many areas, not just our traditional trades and crafts but also just ways for young people to see they can reach their careers of choice and where they want to go through other opportunities.
As for childcare and supports for single mums, the Minister of State mentioned the working family payment. If I may seek confirmation, I believe that that is available to young parents working at least 38 hours over two weeks. There is also the universal childcare scheme. As well as a living wage, we have to look at measures that support the costs families face. In saying that, I am focusing in particular on single parents. There is the GP visit card and access to a medical card, but the GP visit card from next April will be for those with earnings under the median income. How will that median income be evaluated? Maybe we have a rough idea at the moment. Is it in the mid-€30,000s? What is that median income? Potentially how will that be evaluated in April of next year?
Older people are a big concern to me in the region of Roscommon-Galway. According to the latest census, there is a high proportion of people over 66. The things I talk about when I go knocking on doors are the fuel allowance and people not being afraid to put on the heat. Come January of next year, the eligibility criteria will be widened for people over 70. We have to ensure that. Are we looking at an additional 60,000 to 80,000 families coming in under that? Fuel allowance comes under the Department of Social Protection.
As for healthcare, Senator Ruane, I think, mentioned addiction, and I totally agree with her on that. I will finish up on this point. Sometimes we face an awful lot of issues with drug and alcohol addiction. We see that, and it has been mentioned in the context of our city centres. That is also a huge issue. I know that in our hospitals, including in Portiuncula and Roscommon, that is a big challenge. We therefore need to see supports, including alcohol addiction supports, through healthcare in our towns.
Thank you, Senator Dolan. We had to rush you earlier, so this time we are balancing it all.
I thank Senators Ruane, Higgins and Black for proposing this motion for debate. I want to do a kind of meditation on poverty, if I may. I will start by focusing on material poverty and then I will focus on poverty of spirit in this Republic.
I will begin with an area of particular interest to me, that is, disability. That interest is borne out of my family's experience. We know the facts. These are the quantitative, measurable and deterministic facts. One in five persons with a disability in Ireland lives in consistent poverty. I say "God help you" if you are born with a disability in this country because this is one of the worst countries in Europe in which to have a disability. I do not care if I am repeating myself. People live lives of abject misery because they happen to be born into this Republic with a disability. For shame. We should be the best country in Europe in which to have a disability but we are not. Some 27% of our homeless population are people with disabilities. I ask the House to just think about that and about how over-represented people with a disability are among the homeless population. Recent research shows that having a disability incurs an average cost on the household of between €8,700 and €12,300. Disability allowance, however, comes to only €10,816, so it is a grand design, if the allowance is kept at that level, to guarantee that people will live in consistent poverty. As a community of carers and disabled people and citizens, we have consistently asked that the disability allowance be raised to the level of the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, because that is what was recognised as a minimum or living wage. There has been no action on that. That is some of the material poverty in which we live.
I am approached constantly by people who ask me the question, "What will happen to my son or daughter when I die?" I have the same question. The former Minister of State, Finian McGrath, could not answer it in the previous Dáil, not for lack of sincerity or trying to find answers for me. Nobody in the current Cabinet can answer that question for me. As a retired Army officer who served the State here and overseas, and as a parent, I cannot say what will happen to my child when I die. My fear is that he will become homeless, go into crisis or end up in a nursing home in his 30s and 40s. My fear is that he will be inappropriately cared for. That is the experience of more than 1,800 young people with acquired brain injuries and other disabilities who find themselves in such inappropriate settings. That is our Republic.
On poverty more generally, the major factor is housing and homes. I grew up in Finglas. I do not consider that I came from a disadvantaged background but I went to school with boys and played on the street with girls and boys who came from disadvantaged backgrounds. I remember that in 1982 there was a "Today Tonight" special about Finglas. We watched it at home and saw the piebald horses being whipped up the streets and the burnt out cars. We saw ourselves reflected but it was not us. We were othered, however. I remember growing up in that environment. I would go into town on the bus with my mum and we would go down O'Connell Street. I remember we were in Clearys one day and a lady was doing a promotion for biscuits. She opened a tin of biscuits and offered me one. I looked into the tin and picked out the plainest biscuit. The lady - I remember the smell of her perfume and her makeup - put her hand on mine and asked, "Why are you taking the plainest biscuit?" It was because I did not feel I was worth it. She picked up the chocolate biscuit with the sprinkles on it and made me take it. I still remember the feeling of guilt. We internalise the poverty of our environment, and I come from an advantaged background. We had a roof over our heads. I remember, in 1972, playing on the street in Finglas with my sister, watching the prefabricated houses going down to build Finglas south and Finglas west, when we did not have a pot to-----
Go on.
-----proverbially in this country. The population here in 2000 was 3.8 million; it is now 5.1 million. Do the maths. Start building houses. I went to school with boys from those prefabricated houses. They were not perfect, but those boys went on to work at the gas company or became electricians. Some of the boys from my class are partners in some of the biggest law firms in the city today because the human capital had a chance. If, however, you are living in a family hub or a hotel, if you are going to school on a bus and falling asleep in school, if you are homeless, if you are living in a tent, if you are living in rented accommodation, with no security, no fair rent, no fixity of tenure, no freedom to realise your full potential, then you are lost.
I say, therefore, to the people in this House to do no harm. The commodification of health, the commodification of housing, the commodification of childcare, etc., have brought us to the position we are in. The crash of the Celtic tiger was folly, but austerity and all that has flowed from it has been a deliberate policy.
You gave Senator Dolan plenty of leeway, a Leas-Chathaoirligh, so I will take a little myself.
I did not, actually. Senator Dolan finished on time.
She was three minutes over her time.
If we have a senior person who talks about an eviction ban as kicking the can down the road, where does he think those people are going to go? There is nowhere for them to go. What is he trying to do? Create the set of "A Christmas Carol"? Christmas is nine weeks away. There is nowhere for people to go. We have reached an absolute crisis point and we absolutely have to do something about it. The situation in which people like my son, people with disabilities, find themselves in this country is a microcosm of an ideology that has brought us to this place. It is an ideology that runs contrary to the ideology that brought this House into being 100 years ago. I ask all my fellow Senators and all Deputies to go to their parliamentary party meetings and say, "Let us value people, let us invest in people and let us get rid of this neoliberal poverty of spirit that reifies capital to the extent that we find ourselves in this crisis."
As the other Senators were speaking, I was thinking about my own life experience in poverty. My mother was 22 years dead last Wednesday due to pneumonia and bad living conditions. I remember growing up on a halting site in a three bedroom house where five of us used to sleep in the one room and where my mother would light a candle. I remember one time a producer asking me in RTÉ was I ever cold. No, I was never cold. I was always warm and had plenty of love but we were very poor. We would do the markets and did not know we were poor because we had so much love with the candle. Every single night she would light it. Senator Ruane brought it back to me earlier, what my mother and my father did for nine of us who were born and reared on a halting site. The likes of Senator Ruane and me are so lucky to be here, but that does not mean our communities are out of poverty. I think of that song “Love Is All Around”, everywhere we go. For me and for Senator Ruane, poverty is all around us. We see it, we lived it and we breathed it. I thank Senator Ruane, Robert and the rest of her team for bringing this motion forward today.
The Combat Poverty Agency has been closed since 2009, and through the recession, 80% of education funding for the Traveller community was cut, as was funding for working-class people. These organisations which worked for our community had their funding cut. We got rid of the Combat Poverty Agency. I know the Minister of State, and I am so fond of him. I think his heart is in the right place and I understand he is saying it is in the social inclusion division in the Department. We are asking as people who lived and breathed poverty, although obviously we as two individuals have moved on, but our communities are still there. I go into Labre Park and I see it daily within my own community. I see moneylenders and people getting themselves into debt.
In 2015, I met this incredible individual who was ten years homeless and was on drugs. Imagine being homeless for ten years, being on drugs and on the streets of Dublin city. That person today has their own apartment. You can turn your life around with the right supports and it is up to this Government to address that.
Senator Ruane spoke about the sort of one-off social welfare payments. I understand that; we think the budget is brilliant and will help people. It will leave on the lights for an extra week for people and that is the harsh reality of it. I do not want to be seen to be against things all of the time but that is it.
There are people with addictions and who are paying off debts and, with some people, you do not know what is going on in some families’ households. I personally do and I know people at present who owe drug debts and money to moneylenders. I see it in the communities I engage and live with. I know poverty is so real and we need to get down to earth with the poverty that is in our country today. It is up to the Minister of State and to Department to change that. He has the power to support Senator Ruane’s motion by setting up the stand-alone, independent agency that will hold the Government to account so that we can future-proof our generations and we will not have people struggling to get into politics and struggling for jobs.
With the talk of employment going through the roof and how we are great in providing employment, how come then 86% of my community is unemployed? What is it? Do we not matter? Do we not want to work? Do we not want to earn a living or to go to school? Do we not want to do that and are we not included in these conversations? Enough is enough. Senator Ruane's motions are so real. We have had them before where we are asking to set up these bodies again to save people’s lives, because with the stand-alone agency, it will hold the Government to account and that is what we want to do. We want to make people’s lives better, Minister. By supporting this motion, that is what we can do, and we can do it together.
We would like to think that poverty does not exist. We hear where people are on drugs in the Traveller community. We have a mental health crisis within our community and that comes from poverty, whether we like it or not. We can deal with poverty and support people by giving them a hand up, not even a handout but a hand up, out of poverty. We need all communities to get out of poverty. This is one step, and it is only a step, but it is a step in the right direction. It is very disheartening, because I am very fond of the Minister of State, to see that we are patting ourselves on the back and saying we are doing a great job for these people, for the “thems” and the “theys”, for youse over there and for the others. In reality, however, Minister, we are not, because in the world of the “theys”, we have more addiction than we have ever had in this society. We have people living with disabilities who have little or no supports. I am begging of the Minister of State here.
Every single night of my life I ring my husband and ask him to please mind Lacey. My little girl is not two until next September, and that is when I know I can move on and that I do not have to worry about cot death. In the past two days in my community I have heard of three cot deaths. I am sick of hearing of cot deaths and suicide due to nothing else but poverty. Again, we had my mother dying at the age of 48. I am 22 years without my mother all because of living conditions and the way we have to live just because we are members of the Traveller community. It is unfair and unjust and, again, this is only a step. It is scandalous that in Ireland in 2022 we are here speaking about putting in better measures to get people out of poverty in today’s world.
I thank Senator Flynn. I will leave the ultimate word now to Senator Ruane.
I do not think I am the ultimate word. I am following some very powerful and true speeches about what poverty is and they are pointing to one of the key asks. I have heard the Minister of State speak about poverty, but the nub of what we are asking for here is the idea of the independent voice on poverty: the Combat Poverty Agency.
I want to bring us back a little bit and talk about why we are looking to bring back the Combat Poverty Agency, and not just that is a nice idea. I remember when this agency was closed. It was not an accident but was at a time when we had a recession and a policy of austerity which was coming in as the approach taken to that recession. We had a period of time in which there was, unfortunately, a rush, instead of saying we need our information on poverty and independent voices because we are making very difficult choices and need to know in an independent way exactly what the implications are. At that exact time, instead, we saw a push to ensure we silenced critical voices.
The closing of the Combat Poverty Agency was not a simple measure. There were many things that did not change. Our private pension tax reliefs did not change. Certain choices were made and the Combat Poverty Agency was inconvenient because it was an independent voice that spoke about poverty and had an expertise. It meant there would be other pressures to ensure we designed our policies in a particular way and not in the way it happened, which we heard and which I can remember, where all of the Traveller organisations had their funding cut and community development projects and their independent voices were stifled and narrowed to be in a different space.
Tackling poverty is not an administrative task which we can just incorporate into one body to do another job. Tackling poverty requires a challenge to the status quo, to our political priorities and to the State and how it operates. It needs not just to be the voice of those in poverty, which we have heard so loud and clear, but a voice that can challenge society as a whole and say poverty is a problem for society as a whole. It is simply not the same to have a unit inside a Department that may look at certain aspects of social policy. The Department should have that unit on social inclusion and it should be poverty-proofing its policies, but what we are looking for here is advice on poverty-proofing. It is the challenge that Government needs and it is the fact that sometimes it is bad news on a policy. That bad news on a policy needs to be highlighted so that it can be fixed rather than the Department treating it with its gov.ie. labelling, which is effectively it trying to say it is doing its best incrementally on poverty.
Of course there should be poverty proofing and a social inclusion unit, but to suggest that work would not be possible if we had an independent Combat Poverty is ludicrous. We could have and we need both. The work Combat Poverty did in the past was far more than helping us to deal with some of the symptoms of poverty. It was about tackling it. It did reports over 20 years about what poverty means for full participation in the arts and about what tackling poverty means specifically with regard to children. We have highlighted particular areas in our report, including the poverty experienced by Travellers and by those with a disability, which cuts across more than the Department of Social Protection and represents a systemic failure to provide supports. That work is crucial.
In the time remaining in this Oireachtas and in Deputy O'Brien's time as Minister of State, I urge him not simply to have a list of things that Department officials might do, when the next Minister who comes in might give them a different list of things they might or might not do. Put in place the structures, the infrastructure and the independent checks and balances that will and can ensure that not just this Government but any Government will make poverty a focus and address it consistently. That is what I ask. It is an ambitious request. We have new things happening all the time. We know this worked. Nobody ever suggested that the Combat Poverty Agency was anything less than incredibly powerful and effective in its work. Let us bring it back.
I will highlight two or three specific issues. We are at a point where we are in danger of making another mistake. The Minister of State mentioned support for the Vincentian Partnership for Social Justice. Supporting independent research is fine, but we also need to support independent voices that can advocate and challenge us. There is important work on the minimum essential standard of living. We talk about a living wage. The international principle of a living wage is about a decent life and full participation in society. The work the minimum essential standard of living has done encompasses 2,000 real items that people need every day. It is the kind of work we have seen also in examining the cost of disability. What does it cost to live? I worry that at a time when cost of living is suddenly centre stage, we now see the idea of the minimum wage come to the fore, which is a different thing. I appreciate there is a move to have the minimum wage be 66% of the median wage. That is being relabelled as a living wage, but they are different things. We need an improved minimum wage that meets the standard of a living wage, which is an independent, separate standard based on the reality of what it costs to live. Can we afford to lose that kind of data and information at a point when everybody is talking about the cost of living? I urge that that should stay the centre of focus. The Minister of State's Department needs to champion that.
I thank the Minister of State for his support for the idea of the motion, but we cannot be complacent or incremental. We need to be imaginative. When we talk about policies to tackle poverty, it also means policies that tackle those who profit from poverty and the exploitation that is built in. It is not just about realising that austerity and trickle-down economics do not work but that we proof our policies against the trickle-up effect, so to speak, whereby some profit from those who are desperate for housing whom the State has to supplement, and some profit from those who are accepting low, inadequate wages, which the State has to supplement. Let us guard against that as part of our tackling of poverty.
I thank the Minister of State and my colleagues for their comments. I nearly thought twice about coming into this Chamber to talk about poverty. Thankfully, I always have Senator Flynn. She urges Senator Clonan on in the same way to remember who we are, why we are here, and that we are advocates, first and foremost, before anything else. I am starting to be worn out by coming in because I feel that, even if I stayed here for 50 years, I would be having the same conversations and the same contributions back, which would be about this and that being put in place and a once-off payment being given. Nobody is saying that investing in those ways is negative, but unfortunately they are not the solution to end poverty. They are just maintaining people, not ending poverty. That is why we need to be much more ambitious. Unfortunately, when I listen to Senator Dolan talking about her experience and how poverty is at the centre of her mind when she talks about a small farm, it is like, we need a smack of reality here. Poverty cannot be looked at from a perspective of when people have safety. If you listen to Senator Flynn and to communities, they are not voiceless; they are just purposely not heard. There is actually no such thing as a voiceless community. Everyone has a voice. The problem is they are purposely not in the conversation.
I was thinking of a quote, which I have here, on that idea of progress. I know poverty does not look like it did for my dad's generation. The Minister of State talks about progress as if it combats poverty. There is a book called The Melancholia of Class by Cynthia Cruz. When people compare things to how they were, the whole world is developing and moving on. That is just progress. It is not the actual narrowing of any gaps. Before the budget, people were poor, and after the budget, people are poor. They may have a momentary influx of income that week, but poverty continues to exist through budget after budget, Government after Government, formation after formation, and coalition after coalition. The poverty is constant. It just looks different in different decades, and that is what we need to understand. We wear different clothes, we dress in clothes from Penneys, we present ourselves, and we are not going around with holes in our knees. We have to understand that poverty looks different. We need to challenge the concept of poverty and power. The quote from Cynthia Cruz, and it really rings true for me today in the contributions, is:
The worship of progress is nothing new, of course, and is, in its ideology, inherently anti-working-class. Progress is a middle-class ideology, an ideology of the status quo. Their idea of progress is superficial and anti-revolutionary. Instead of overthrowing the political system, middle-class liberals want to make cosmetic, and not systematic, changes to the system – without interrupting or engaging with structures of oppression.
That is what it comes down to.
We can speak about the tangible things we can point at, like houses and welfare. Community development projects have been silenced or privatised. It is not the same anymore. There are many issues with the social inclusion and community activation programme, SICAP. We can point to all of those things, but unfortunately, there is something else invisible happening that nobody seems to be able to get a grasp on, and that is the fact that poverty is about class and power. Until we can face up to that and begin to grapple with it, we will not alleviate poverty. I do not think people should take offence at that. Unfortunately, I find that politicians take more offence at being asked to do better at ending poverty than people who are living in extreme poverty take offence at living in poverty. There is something wrong with that. People in poverty are living in dire situations, yet they seem to be able to engage in the conversation in a much more reasonable way than are people who are being challenged to end poverty. They always become defensive. Why is everyone getting defensive? People need to remove the personal from the idea and look at how we end poverty and not be afraid of criticism. Do not be afraid. Welcome it. Take it as a challenge. That is what the Combat Poverty Agency can do with full independence. People should welcome that because we should all want a society where poverty is not a thing. Our jobs as politicians are only done if that is achieved. The problem is we are not doing our job as politicians.
I thank Senator Ruane. I acknowledge the courage of people who gave their personal stories and testimonies tonight during the debate. That takes great personal courage and should be saluted. I welcome our guests to the Visitors Gallery. They are the guests of our esteemed colleague Senator Pauline O'Reilly. It is great to have them here.
Question put and agreed to.
When is it proposed to sit again?
Tomorrow at 10.30 a.m.
Cuireadh an Seanad ar athló ar 6.40 p.m. go dtí 10.30 a.m., Déardaoin, 20 Deireadh Fómhair 2022.
The Seanad adjourned at 6.40 p.m. until 10.30 a.m. on Thursday, 20 October 2022.